Police seized more than a thousand weapons in 2018 during raids on far-right groups, amid increasing concerns about militant attacks. Experts are alarmed at the increase.
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An expert on right-wing extremism has warned of "massive rearmament" by neo-Nazi groups after German police seized 61% more weapons during raids on the radical right in 2018 than the previous year.
German public broadcaster ARD on Friday, citing Interior Ministry figures requested by the socialist Left party, reported that 1,091 weapons were seized from crimes by alleged far-right extremists last year. In 2017, 676 weapons were confiscated.
The weapons seized included handguns, rifles, and other conflict apparatus including explosives, detonators, knives, batons, projectiles and even replica guns.
The government figures were based on 563 right-wing-motivated crimes involving weapons, including 235 violent incidents.
'Frightening' sign of trouble ahead
The increase was described as "frightening and alarming" by Matthias Quent, an expert on right-wing extremism at the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society, or IDZ.
He said the figures showed "a massive armament and rearmament of Germany's right-wing radical scene."
Quent said neo-Nazi groups were preparing to stage fresh militant attacks on minorities, political opponents and representatives of the state.
"Their goal is to intimidate society and the displacement of certain groups of people. Parts of the scene even want a civil war," he told ARD.
A separate Interior Ministry report released this month revealed that authorities had registered 8,605 right-wing offenses in the first half of 2019, an increase of 900 crimes.
The number of violent crimes committed by known right-wing extremists rose by 3.2%, from 1,054 to 1,088, according to the report.
Thousands recruited
The domestic security agency (BfV) believes there are around 24,000 right-wing extremists in Germany, of whom nearly 13,000 are considered "violence-driven."
Leading members of the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party have often made provocative, if not outright offensive, remarks — targeting refugees or evoking Nazi terminology.
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Björn Höcke
The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia first made headlines in 2017 for referring to Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame" and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. In July 2023, he echoed Nazi rhetoric by declaring that "This EU must die so that the true Europe may live." In 2019, a court ruled that it was not slanderous to describe Höcke as a fascist.
Image: picture-alliance/Arifoto Ug/Candy Welz
Alice Weidel
One of the best-known public faces of the AfD, party co-chair Alice Weidel rarely shies away from causing a row. Her belligerent rhetoric caused particular controversy in a Bundestag speech in 2018, when she declared, "burqas, headscarf girls, publicly-supported knife men, and other good-for-nothings will not secure our prosperity, economic growth, and the social state."
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Maximilian Krah
Maximilian Krah, the AfD's top candidate in the 2024 European Parliament election, has called the EU a "vassal" of the US and wants to replace it with a "confederacy of fatherlands." He also wants to end support for Ukraine, and has warned on Twitter that immigration will lead to an "Umvolkung" of the German people — a Nazi-era term similar to the far-right's "great replacement" conspiracy theory.
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Alexander Gauland
Former parliamentary party leader Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD's youth wing in June 2018. He said Germany had a "glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history."
Christian Lüth
Ex-press officer Christian Lüth had already faced demotion for past contentious comments before being caught on camera talking to a right-wing YouTube video blogger. "The worse things get for Germany, the better they are for the AfD," Lüth allegedly said, before turning his focus to migrants. "We can always shoot them later, that's not an issue. Or gas them, as you wish. It doesn't matter to me."
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Beatrix von Storch
Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts — but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. "People who won't accept STOP at our borders are attackers," the European lawmaker said in 2016. "And we have to defend ourselves against attackers," she said — even if this meant shooting at women and children.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Murat
Harald Weyel
Not all of the AfD's scandals are about racism: Sometimes they are just revealing. Bundestag member Harald Weyel was caught in a scandal in September 2022 when a microphone he clearly didn't know was on caught him expressing his hope that Germany would suffer a "dramatic winter" of high energy prices or else "things will just go on as ever."
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Andre Poggenburg
Poggenburg, former head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to "get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus" — the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.
